Matthew Binginot found joy and belonging at the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont as a high school student attending the summer arts camp there 20 years ago.
Binginot, a producer, designer and media creator with a studio in Burlington, said he was lucky to attend the summer arts program that he said was “life changing because I always loved music but it was my first time experiencing music production.”
The organization hosts multiple residential summer learning programs at college campuses all over the state in areas ranging from climate science to engineering and serves 600 students annually. But the arts institute is the oldest and expects to welcome about 190 high school students this summer.
The arts funding is now gone, said Binginot, who works as the outreach and communications manager for the institute that published a public appeal for donations on Thursday.
From local libraries and community theater to summer camps, performing arts and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, letters from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities announcing federal rollbacks have struck a rude blow to statewide programming.
The cuts have a serious impact across Vermont and across the nation, said Susan Evans McClure, executive director of the Vermont Arts Council, who moderated a discussion with a call to action hosted by U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., at the Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph Friday afternoon.
“There’s a lot to take in and a lot of it has serious economic, long-term and short-term impacts here,” she said. “At the same time, we’ve all seen the power that the arts and humanities and culture have to bring us together, to heal, to connect and to inspire.”
The letters on May 2 came a month after state humanities councils awards were terminated. In his first term, President Donald Trump tried to close the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The loss of critical federal grant funding has left organizations across Vermont reeling since they received the funding termination notices.
Affected organizations include Acorn Youth Crafts, the Fletcher Free Library and the Flynn in Burlington, Shelburne Museum, Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Vermont Folklife and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra.
Vermont Humanities, which relies on federal funding for about 42% of its annual budget, has lost about $800,000 for the rest of the year, according to Executive Director Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup, who represented the organization Friday in Randolph.
The group has lost two full-time positions and is revising its budget, looking for other sources and matches for an emergency federal fund that has since emerged, he said.
“It’s very discouraging to have this attack happen on federal funding,” he said. “We do know that Vermonters care deeply about the arts and humanities and they are stepping up, but there’s no way to replace that federal funding with resources from within our community, which is why we’re having to change our budget.”
Funding for three of the Flynn’s dance performances, two of which have already taken place, has been scrapped, according to the letter they received last week, said Executive Director Jay Wahl, who put out an advocacy appeal on social media soon after.
“The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President. Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities,” the letter he received stated, rescinding $25,000 that supported the 2024-25 season’s October performances of Ballet Hispanic, the April 15 Complexions Contemporary Ballet show, and the upcoming May 27 Agathe and Adrien performance called “N.Ormes.”
The nonprofit typically receives between $20,000 and $30,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts annually.
“It is alarming to me that our commitment to support dance and the human body in all its forms no longer aligns with the goals of this administration,” Wahl said. “It’s not going to stop our commitment to audiences and artists, that’s just who we are. We’ll just figure it out.”
The letter was a complete surprise for Miranda Miller, director of Acorn Youth Arts, based in East Corinth. The $10,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant it had secured would have helped create a literary arts program for youth in Orange and Washington counties and across Vermont.
“We had created our promotional materials and were in the process of sending them out to school principals to recruit youth when we got the notice. So that just sort of stopped everything in our tracks,” she said.
After a decade of steady support, recipients at the Governor’s Institute were stunned the National Endowment for the Arts rescinded $30,000 that supports its immersive two-week summer arts program. The rollback has caused chaos as officials scramble to find alternate funding, Binginot said.
“Terminating federal funding for arts and culture organizations, with little or no notice, has a negative impact on our state’s creative economy and means that Vermonters will have less access to the arts at a time when we need them the most,” Evans McClure said in an email.
The Vermont Arts Council has grant funding available, and she encouraged arts organizations to apply.
Despite the recent cuts and rollbacks, speakers at the meeting in Randolph remained hopeful and called for public action on the arts and humanities in the face of ongoing threats and defunding by the Trump administration.
Balint encouraged the audience to keep creating, telling and sharing stories, to invest talent and energy in the arts in order to “continue to inspire, and give each other vision, and give each other hope when things are so dark.”
The National Endowment for the Arts is facing a lawsuit for preventing money to promote so-called “gender ideology,” The Guardian US reported. Kaufman Ilstrup said he expects to see more opposition to the cutbacks and more organizing for the arts and the humanities in Vermont and beyond.
“People are fired up. They’re ready to organize,” he said. “People know that their small arts organizations, their public libraries, their local historical societies are part of what makes Vermont so awesome, and they want that to continue — not just here but all over the country.”
Correction: A previous version of the story misidentified the grant an organization received, and misnamed an organization that was not affected by NEA or NEH grants.
